(Winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction) Cancer physician Siddhartha Mukherjee here gives us a profoundly humane "biography" of the disease, from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago, through the epic battles in the 20th century to cure, control, and conquer it, to a radical new understanding of its essence. The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist, recounting centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths. From the Persian Queen Atossa, whose Greek slave may have cut off her diseased breast, to the 19th-century recipients of primitive radiation and chemotherapy, and Mukherjee's own leukemia patient Carla, The Emperor of All Maladies is about the people who have soldiered through fiercely demanding regimens in order to survive and also to increase our understanding of this enigmatic disease.

"This volume should earn Mukherjee a rightful place alongside Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, and Stephen Hawking in the pantheon of our epoch's great explicators."—Boston Globe